fugacious.net

Klockwerks

Roger Wood makes some of the most beautiful clocks I have ever seen. Dad, you would love them.

If I had to pick only two (my screenwidth doesn't allow me any more), I'd go for these two. And if I'd had cash of course. And if not some lucky bastard had already bought them. But anyway.

Busking

Finally a great definition for busking (by Dr F.) It also contains a definition for a "back-busk":

It is even possible to experience a "Back-Busk". This is when two experienced Buskers are busking hard and a busk is answered by another busk. Upon realisation of such an occurance, it is both Buskers' duty to cease the conversation and buy each other a beer, as nobody likes to be caught busking. It displays a lack of skill and finesse.

Brendan

Happy Birthday Brendan!

I Love You Lance

A description of a near-air disaster:

When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: 'We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!' This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing. Then there was a second male voice from the flight deck, this one remarkably calm and precise, making the passengers believe there was someone in charge after all, an element of hope: "This is American 2-1-3 to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it's like. It's worse than we'd ever imagined. They didn't prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation. In less than 3 minutes we will touch down, so to speak. They will find our bodies in some field, strewn about in the grisly attitudes of death. I love you, Lance." This time there was a brief pause before the mass wailing commenced. Lance? What kind of people were in control of this aircraft? The crying took on a bitter and disillusioned tone.

From Don DeLillo's White Noise (thanks Ali)

Why Not?

J: Why are you so cute?
S: Why not?

The Whole Catastrophe

[...]He used to say that music could be either about almost nothing, one tiny strand of sound plucked like a silver hair from the head of the Muse, or about everything there was, all of it, tutti tutti, life, marriage, otherworlds, earthquakes, uncertainties, warnings, rebukes, journeys, dreams, love, the whole ball of wax, the full nine yards, the whole catastrophe.[...]

Yet another quote from Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Combat Zones in Manhattan

From Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet

In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth.

Iggy II, Johannesburg

Nerve/

Nerve/ has been launched.

Top Gun Rock'n Roll

I have a lot of work to do on various subsites for fugacious.net: So I put on Standing in the Shadows of Motown (starring The Funk Brothers), adjusted my headphones to a comfortable fit, amped up the volume, and turned my metaphorical cap back-to-front. I am ready.

This, is rock'n roll programming.

Her: Comic Strip

Found this dark and minimalist comic strip called Her.

Weird Sexual Tension

I found this on a quotations page on jeremy.org's website.

This morning I decided that the only thing that can save me now is my uncanny ability to turn almost any potentially sexual situation into a platonic relationship with weird sexual tension and undertones.

- Brent Thomas, 12/16/2002, personal communication

Go and Insensitivity

On the Chinese/Japanese boardgame Go

That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.

Blogging Dreams

Blogging dreams haunted me last night - and feeling compelled to blog about this is part of the problem and is not going to stop the voices.

Broken Links

I seem to have developed stage fright (in the blogging sense!).

I thought I'd browse through my logs, and I discovered that people actually visit this site. Strangers wander in from Google! I think the most popular search request is Interpol Review. Aircraft Carrier For Sale also appears to be quite a hit. And I can't fathom what exactly this person was searching for: Blazer Potato Head. But I hope I was able to satisfy.

And this is the number one site in the world for Cyber Robe Hat Chat!!

I moved hosts recently, so all those Google search results take you into rather unfortunate areas of the site:

So, here are the more accurate links into the archives:

• Interpol Review
• Aircraft Carrier For Sale
• for that good man who searched for Cyber Robe Hat Chat
• and Blazer Potato Head (if you ever come back again)

06:10 PM

Blogroll

I have added a blogroll underneath Spare Links. There are only two blogs on there: kottke.org and torrez.org. I know - it is meagre, but it's quality stuff.

kottke.org was the first blog I ever read and was totally fascinated by, and torrez.org ... I don't know - I like him (e.g. 1, 2).

Update: I have removed the blogroll again. I think it's a stupid idea. For now. Maybe later. I think.

Capitalist Society and Images

Ok ok, one more quote one more quote from On Photography:

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

Susan Sontag, published in 1977

Movement to Emulate Lei Feng

Just finished reading On Photography by Susan Sontag, so this will be the last quote from that book. The following is from a footnote:

The Chinese concern for the reiterative function of images (and of words) inspires the distributing of additional images, photographs that depict scenes in which, clearly, no photographer could have been present; and the continuing use of such photographs suggests how slender is the population's understanding of what photographic images and picture-taking imply. In his book Chinese Shadows, Simon Leys gives an example from the "Movement to Emulate Lei Feng", a mass campaign of the mid-1960s to inculcate the ideals of Maoist citizenship built around the apotheosis of an Unknown Citizen, a conscript named Lei Feng who died at twenty in a banal accident. Lei Feng Exhibitions organized in the large cities included "photographic documents, such as 'Lei Feng helping an old woman to cross the street', 'Lei Feng secretly [sic] doing his comrade's washing', 'Lei Feng giving his lunch to a comrade who forgot his lunch box', and so forth", with, apparently, nobody questioning "the providential presence of a photographer during the various incidents in the life of that humble, hitherto unknown soldier." In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.

First published in 1977.

Jesus is Mine

from Ghana (thanks DDD)

The Girl Next Door

Another story by David Sedaris. Who is this guy? He's so good. I was trying to find this story on The New Yorker - where it's from - but it is impossible (google!). The site is so badly designed. Or perhaps it is by design that old articles shouldn't be found any longer.

Or perhaps I'm just being silly.

But thankfully I copied the story from the web several weeks ago, so I've republished it on fugacious.net with absolutely no permission from anybody.

Correction: I found the link

Monday Now

Well, it's Monday now, and everything is back to normal. There was a lot of last minute panic, as certain links no longer worked, and pictures didn't always appear - but all that seems to be sorted out now. (Most worrying was that my "I have nice gentials" link in the menu pointed to a homosexual article. I didn't see the humour in that.)

Business As Usual

I'm moving fugacious.net to a new host - my old one just can't handle the outrageous load any longer.

The new one is here.

I've taken every step to ensure that fugacious.net does remain available 24/7. If for any reason you are unable to get to the site, please don't hesitate to contact me on +447906181175, or leave a comment down at the bottom.

My new host is eagerly awaiting fugacious.net. Relevant personnel have been alerted, all ports have been opened, the firewalls have been amped up, and the protocols have been upgraded. We are ready to rock'n roll.

By Monday everything should be back to normal.

Iggy, Johannesburg

Quotes

What!? Is this site turning into some sort of quotes repository? How boring.

On Patina

Fewer and fewer [people] possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino Elegies as being essential to a human landscape.

From On Photography by Susan Sontag

Crow

A transcription of Ted Hughes' own commentary on a character he calls Crow.

The story begins in heaven, where God is having a nightmare. The nightmare appears to God as a hand. And this hand, in his nightmare, is also a voice - so it is a voice-hand or a hand-voice. And this thing comes the moment he falls asleep. This thing arrives and grabs him round the throat, and throttles him and lifts him out of his heaven and rushes him through his universe and pushes him beyond his stars and then ploughs up the Earth with his face and throws him back into heaven. And...whenever he drowses off and falls asleep, this hand arrives and the whole thing happens again.

Trickster

There is a mythological archetype called Trickster. Trickster is found in many mythologies, including those of the North American Indians.

Paul Radin, an authority on the Trickster Cycles of the North American Indians, describes Trickster as being

... at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good or evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being ... Laughter, humour and irony permeate everything Trickster does ... he is primarily an inchoate being of undetermined proportions, a figure foreshadowing the shape of man.

Trickster has never been restricted to one society. In European countries he appears in the guise of Jester or Fool, and his roots in the human psyche are deep. Alan Garner has collected Trickster stories from many countries in his book The Guizer and he writes:

If we take the elements from which our emotions are built and give them separate names such as Mother, Hero, Father, King, Child, Queen, the element that I think marks most of us is that of the Fool. It is where our humanity lies. For the Fool is the advocate of uncertainty: he is at once creator and destroyer, bringer of help and harm. He draws a boundary for chaos, so that we can make sense of the rest. He is the shadow that shapes the light. Psychology calls him Trickster. I have called him Guizer. Guizer is the proper word for an actor in a mumming play. He is comical, grotesque, stupid, cunning, ambiguous. He is sometimes part animal, and always part something else. The something else is what is so special. He is the dawning godhead in Man.

Taken from an essay by Dr Ann Skea.

On Photography

Two quotes found in an essay by Susan Sontag titled 'In Plato's Cave':

It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer undistputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Love Without Trust

[...]Happiness is human, not divine, and the pursuit of happiness is what we might call love. This love, earthly love, is a truce between metamorphs, a temporary agreement not to shape-shift while kissing or holding hands. Love is a beach towel spread over shifting sands. Love is intimate democracy, a compact that insists on renewals, and you can be voted out overnight, however big your majority. It's fragile, precarious, and it's all we can get without selling our souls to one party or the other. It's what we can have while remaining free. This is what Vina Apsara meant when she spoke of a love without trust. All treaties can be broken, all promises end up as lies. Sign nothing, make no promises. Make a provisional reconciliation, a fragile peace. If you're lucky it might last five days; or fifty years.